Climate Risk Management in Nepal

Project Area

The project was implemented in districts located in the mid-hill and terai regions of Nepal. Arghakhanchi and Udayapur Districts represented the mid hill, while Kapilvastu and Siraha Districts represented Tarai districts. The mid-hill districts have a varied ecology, with tropical to subtropical climate in southern Churia hills and plains, and mild temperate type of climate in mid-hills; while in the high hills, the temperate climate is dominant. About 15-26 percent of the total land is cultivable in the midhill districts. The forest coverage ranges from 41-72 percent. The maximum temperature is 34° Celsius to minimum 4° Celsius. The total average rainfall is 1,260 mm with 85% humidity. The irrigation facilities are very poor.

Similarly, the temperate types of climate dominate the terai districts. The coverage of cultivable land ranges from 56-67%. The forest coverage also ranges from 41-48 percent. The maximum temperature is 40° Celsius to minimum 2° Celsius. The total average rainfall is 1,467 mm with 90% humidity. The Tarai districts are is considered productive, but poor irrigation is also a crucial problem here.

Local perceptions on hazards/risks

The major climatic hazards in mid hills are flood, landslide, hailstorms, frost, droughts and epidemics of crops and livestock diseases and pests. Epidemics of diseases and pests of crops and livestock are other hazards. In terai, the major hazards as perveived by the farmers are flood, drought, hot wave, cold wave, and frost, dew / pala (pala = winter fog causing blight in potato). The areas along the riverbank are suffering from sedimentation caused by flood. More irrigation is required in such land due to high percolation and seepage problem. Flood and landslides are mainly responsible for damage of standing crops, erosion of productive land along the riverbank or at the foothill areas. These hazards also cause damage to community's assets like road, schools, market centres, irrigation canals, drinking water systems, and forest resources. Droughts are responsible for crop failure mainly the winter crops like wheat, oilseed, and pulses. Insects and pests are also responsible for crop failure. Cold wave not only damages the productivity of winter crops but also makes life very tough particularly to elderly and children.﻿

The frequency of the occurrence of the hazard is increasing. In farmers' view, the main reasons are changing climatic conditions. High temperature and no rain invite longer droughts. The severity of these hazards would further increase in near future affecting particularly to productive land and community's assets like road, irrigation canal, school, markets, etc. The occurrence of different hazards not only challenged the people's lives and livelihood but also destroyed the land and communities assets at local level. The hazards also affect in social environment. In the recent years, there are more cases of seasonal and permanent migration thus the workloads of elderly, women and children particularly have increased. Due to constant fear and losses of assets from the various hazards, tendency of shifting occupation from on- farm to off- farm is common. With the tendency of continuous crop failure, people usually sell their land even in cheaper price and divert to small-scale business. With the increasing trends of climatic hazards, evidences were also observed on conflict of indigenous and migrant population about the resource sharing. The outbreak of many respiratory and vector borne diseases such as Malaria, Dengue, Japanese Encephalitis, Kala-azar and communicable diseases like cough, cold, eye infection, etc were also perceived by the people.

The inputs for improved farming system are irrigation, seeds and seeding materials, chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and agriculture loan. Local market (haat bazaar), DADO, DLSO, local NGOs, Indian market, cooperative, private shop and agro vet are the main sources where the farmers get the inputs. The DADO and DSLO have been providing technical trainings to farmer groups along with some inputs in promoting skills and knowledge. Agriculture Development Bank (Nepal) has been providing loan to the farmers. With the growing number of Saving and Credit groups and cooperatives, farmers prefer to take loan from these institutions because of lower interest rates. Inadequate knowledge, ignorance, poor market information system, complicated process of accessing loan from institutions is some of the hindering factors for using lesser inputs.

Rainwater, surface irrigation, Swallow Tube Well, conservation pond, etc are some of the sources for irrigation. However, the reliability of irrigation facilities is also in decreasing trend. The reasons are frequent flood, longer droughts, depletion of forest resource in Churia area and irregular rainfall patterns. The longer droughts are responsible to lowering the ground water table, which affected the poor performance of deep and shallow tube-wells in terai. With the increasing sedimentation through high soil erosion in upstream, there is a seepage problem of water hence farmers are unable to divert the water from the river into the canal.

Farmers have inadequate knowledge and skills on improved farming like proper use of chemical fertilizer, early variety selection, application of pesticide (time and amount), seed and nursery management and off-season vegetable production, soil fertility management techniques and post harvest technologies. Poor marketing skills and information is another constraint. Farmers of terai are affected by subsidy policy made by the Indian government to its farmers on seeds, fertilizers, and irrigational facilities. Hence Nepali farmers are unable to compete with Indian farmers while selling the agriculture products. Maize, wheat and paddy are the major crops. Production trend of maize is in increasing trend in mid-hills while productivity of paddy is in increasing trend in terai. The production trends of wheat are increasing in the mid-hills. The declining productivity of oil crops is perceived in all the study villages.

Erratic rainfall has negative impacts on agriculture and other sectors in both mid-hill and terai. Majority of the people opined that there are changes in rainfall pattern. Interestingly, change in rainfall month as well as the negative impacts of decrease in rainfall are similar in both mid-hill and terai districts. The change pattern of hailstone is more observed in mid-hills. People have clearly experienced the changing pattern of temperature in both mid-hills and terai regions. Looking at the impacts of increased temperature pattern, there are negative impacts in people's lives and livelihood. People have experienced the impacts of climate change but they have poor knowledge about its exact reasons.

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Climate Change Adaptation and Disaster Risk Management in Nepal

Nepal was the first country in South Asia to create a policy and a legal framework for disaster management with the Natural Calamity (Relief) Act 2039 promulgated in 1982. This act, for the first time in Nepal, institutionalized disaster relief from the ad hoc disposition of the Rana period to make it a state responsibility. It constituted the Central Disaster Relief Committee (CDRC) with the Minister of Home Affairs as the Chair and, for the first time, allocated the district level management of rescue and relief activities to the Chief District Officer (CDO).

Very progressive when promulgated, this act, although amended twice, has however failed to further develop and internalize changing concepts of development and to respond to the paradigm shift in disaster risk management from a reactive intervention in the form of relief to a proactive approach of prevention, mitigation and preparedness. The act lacks any instrument to correspond to the current concept of mainstreaming disaster risk management to the efforts of national development. Therefore the act must be replaced by a new act that could internalize all the recent concepts of disaster risk management. This need was nationally recognized and action has been initiated.

Nepal is just now in advanced stages of responding to the need for renewal of its legal and policy framework for Disasters Risk Management (DRM) and is developing with broad stakeholder involvement and with facilitation support from UNDP a new national strategy for disaster risk management. The first draft of the strategy is just ready for review. The strategy is closely oriented along the lines of the Hyogo Framework for Action (HFA) and it implies for Nepal a major shift in government policies away from an emergency response driven way of working toward a disaster risk management perspective, which puts equal emphasis on prevention, mitigation and preparedness, highlights the links between disaster management and development, as well as the cross sectoral nature of DRM and the responsibilities of a variety of actors in DRM.

Project Background

The projects attended four gaps identified: firstly, they supported the building up of institutional and technical capacities of the MoAC at national and district levels, in particular within its line agencies DoA and DoL to address in a proactive way climate risk management and disaster prevention/preparedness related issues from an agricultural perspective, including the emerging challenges of adaptation to climate change. The new strategy for DRM provides for the first time in Nepal an institutional framework which recognizes the important role of agriculture in DRM. Until now, the agriculture sector did not have any formal mandate related to disaster risk prevention or preparedness. Building institutional and technical capacity within MoAC related to climate change impacts, vulnerability and adaptation will also provide a comparative advantage to better represent the agriculture sector in National Adaptation Programme of Action (NAPA) facilitated by the MoEST.

Secondly, they addressed droughts and drought spells which have regular impacts on agricultural production. Drought impacts cause substantive losses every year, however, due to their slow on-setting nature are however hardly ever categorized in Nepal as disasters. The impacts of drought spells and droughts on agricultural production have neither been systematically recorded so far, nor have they been addressed in the context of disaster risk management in Nepal. Deficit rainfall during 2006 in Nepal triggered one of the intensive emergency operations.

Thirdly,projects supported the building on the existing Early Warning System (EWS), introduced innovative weather/climate/flood forecast application products tailored to the local needs of farmers to increase lead times for flood and drought warnings to facilitate farmer’s strategic decision making in the choice of seasonal crops and other management alternatives. Efforts are needed to improve the current 24 hours forecasts into long lead forecasts, which would help to expand the scope of early warning from its current focus on the saving of lives towards a better safeguarding of peoples’ livelihoods as well.

Lastly, projects introduced and demonstrated through a guided learning by doing process at district and community levels, a set of locally adapted, innovative and gender-sensitive technologies for climate risk adaptation within the agriculture sector; thus enhancing local awareness about disaster prevention and adaptation to climate variability and change and the resilience of local communities against the impacts and unpredictability of current climatic extremes.